Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
important bird areas (BirdLife International, 2004). There is an obvious
need to expand such work to incorporate other taxa (Eken et al., 2004),
and to prioritize the most threatened and irreplaceable sites (Ricketts et
al., 2005). Such initiatives have recently gained strong political support
under the Convention on Biological Diversity, through the development
of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and the Programme of
Work on Protected Areas. Both mechanisms call for the identii cation,
recognition and safeguarding of sites of biodiversity conservation signii -
cance. Meanwhile, considerable attention is also targeted at the scale of
landscapes and seascapes, to ensure not just the representation of bio-
diversity but also of the connectivity, spatial structure and processes that
allow its persistence (Cowling et al., 2003).
Global conservation planning is key for strategic allocation of l exible
resources. Despite divergence in methods between the dif erent schemes,
an overall picture is emerging in which a few regions, particularly in
the tropics and in Mediterranean-type environments, are consistently
emphasized as priorities for biodiversity conservation. It is crucial that the
global donor community channels sui cient resources to these regions, at
the very minimum. This focus will continue to improve if the rigour and
breadth of biodiversity and threat data continue to be consolidated, espe-
cially important given the increased accountability demanded from global
donors. However, it is through the conservation of actual sites that bio-
diversity will ultimately be preserved, or lost, and thus drawing the lessons
of global conservation prioritization down to a much i ner scale is now the
primary concern for conservation planning.
Notes
1.
This chapter is an expanded version of Brooks et al. (2006), 'Global biodiversity conser-
vation priorities',
Science
,
313
(5783), 58-61, originally published by AAAS.
2.
We thank G. Fabregas, D. Knox, T. Lacher, P. Langhammer, N. Myers, A. Sugden and
W. Turner for help with the manuscript, anonymous peer reviewers for comments, the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for funding, D. Ockwell and J. Lovett for the invi-
tation for this contribution and for editorial help, and AAAS for permission to reprint
this expanded version of our original review paper.
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